Wealth gap between Hong Kong’s crazy rich, miserably poor widens since handover
- Top 10 per cent earn 40 times more than bottom 10 per cent who are struggling to make ends meet as gap widens because of mix of reasons
- Experts call for more government intervention to help poor ‘who face hardship on all fronts’
Looking around his cramped home, with his family’s possessions piled up to save space, Chan Chuen-bui, 71, recalled that life was not this hard in his younger days.
The Hongkonger, who worked in interior furnishing, said he used to earn between HK$20,000 and HK$30,000 a month in 1997, and lived in a 300 sq ft low-cost public housing flat in Kwai Chung, paying about HK$1,000 a month.
“Jobs were not difficult to come by and as long as you worked hard, you could feed yourself well,” he said. “But that is not the case any more.”
Given a potent mix of reasons, from globalisation to government policy to high housing prices, Hong Kong’s wealth disparity has widened since the city returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The end outcome has been that poor people such as Chan find it tougher to get by despite working hard.
At the other end of the social spectrum, the city’s wealthy have grown richer, with incomes dozens of times more than what the poorest earn.
Chan said there was less furnishing work to do after 1997, especially since soaring home prices put an end to average income earners’ plans to buy flats.